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Albert Einstein died in Princeton on April 18, 1955. His dying wish was a modest funeral without wide publicity - and that’s what happened. The scientist's body was cremated, and at the funeral, which was attended by only 12 people, his ashes were scattered to the wind. However, the scientist was cremated... not all of him. His brain is presumably still preserved in formaldehyde, available for research.
The scientist's brain was removed by Thomas Harvey, the pathologist who performed Einstein's autopsy at Princeton Hospital. At that time, it seemed to the doctor that it was self-evident that the brain of the great scientist should be studied - moreover, he was sure that the scientist himself had so bequeathed it. The fact that his actions were later identified as theft was a shock to him.
Harvey photographed the brain from every possible angle and then carefully cut it into 240 small pieces, each of which was packaged in a jar of formaldehyde or colloidal film.
When the fact of hiding Einstein's brain became known, Harvey was asked to return it to a relative, but he categorically refused. Almost immediately this was followed by dismissal, and later by divorce from his wife. Harvey's life was completely destroyed - until the end of his days he worked as an ordinary worker at a factory, only in his old age giving an interview for a documentary film dedicated to his "theft." Later, after the fact, Einstein’s relatives gave permission to study the scientist’s brain.
The first study of Einstein's brain occurred in 1984 - 29 years after the scientist's death. Then a group of scientists published in the journal Experimental Neurology two areas of Einstein's brain (Brodmann's areas 9 and 39) with similar areas of the control group. The scientists' conclusion was that the ratio of neuroglial cells to neurons was higher in Einstein than in others.
This study was so criticized that no one took its results seriously. Among the main arguments were that the control group consisted of only 11 people, which is too small for comparison, and moreover, they were all significantly younger than Einstein at the time of his death.
15 years later, these errors were taken into account and an article published in the medical journal “The Lancet” reported on a study of a larger group of people whose average age was exactly 57 years old - it was with them that the scientist’s brain was compared. Researchers then identified special areas of the brain responsible for mathematics abilities, and noted that they were larger than the rest, and the scientist’s brain itself was 15% wider than the average brain.
In between these studies, there was another, in 1996, which found that the total weight of Einstein's brain (1230 g) was slightly less than the average adult male brain (1400 g), but countered by the fact that Einstein's neuron density was much higher. and much more than usual. Apparently, the researchers suggest, this provided the scientist with a much larger and more intense connection between neurons and, accordingly, better brain activity.
Harvey himself kept the photographs and Einstein's brain with him all this time until his death. He passed away in 2007, after which his family donated all this data to the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Springs. Although Harvey has repeatedly stated that he collaborated with other scientists studying Einstein's brain, no documentation of these experiments has been found.
Later, in 2012, anthropologist Dean Falk examined Einstein's brain using photographs. She discovered that the scientist had a highly developed part that is generally considered to be developed in left-handed musicians. Actually, the fact that Einstein played the violin is not a secret.
She also discovered an additional gyrus in the frontal lobe of the brain, which is thought to be responsible for memory and the ability to plan ahead. Einstein's corpus callosum, according to Dean Falk's report, is also different from most people - it is much thicker, which could mean that the communication of information between the two hemispheres of the scientist's brain was more intense.
Terence Hines, a psychologist at a university in New York, considers all this research a waste of time. He is confident that each person's brain is so individual that even if you find another person with exactly the same characteristics, this will not mean that this person will be a genius. He argues that it is simply impossible to identify genius by the physical measurement of the brain.
Was Einstein a genius because his brain was special, or was his brain special because he was a genius? This question still remains open.
Incredible facts
In the entire human history of the existence of brilliant people, no one is probably more clearly associated with genius than Albert Einstein. He destroyed and then changed our understanding of time as such. He explained the principle of gravity and how it affects celestial bodies and their satellites. He created the initially frightening symbiosis between matter and energy, deducing the most famous equation in history: E = MC2. His iconic popular image is disheveled hair and tongue hanging out– firmly cemented in the public consciousness. We often use something like “Of course, he is smart, but he is far from Einstein,” since for all people intelligence and Einstein are interchangeable things.
But how smart was he really? Has he ever taken an IQ test? Were there any structural differences in Einstein's brain that made him different from other people? Was he anatomically larger? Or did he simply use his brain more than anyone else? How did his brain manage to create such a huge number of ingenious things? These and many other questions intrigued people for many years, so much so that after his death, his brain was literally cut into small pieces, which went to scientific laboratories around the world as scientists wanted to understand why it was different from the rest.
They were even ready to commit sacrilege (Einstein was cremated, and it is not entirely clear who gave permission to preserve, let alone study, his brain) in order to find out how the most famous physicist of all times was able to see so many things, not understandable to the average person.
Now let's take a close look at the brain of the great scientist, literally and figuratively.
What happened to Einstein's brain?
Albert Einstein's body was cremated after his death. After the autopsy, his brain was removed (or stolen, depending on your point of view) by Princeton Hospital pathologist Thomas Harvey. Harvey hoped to uncover the secret of the scientist's genius by dismembering the great physicist's brain into 200 pieces, which he sent to leading scientists around the world. Towards the end of his life, Harvey, who had never been able to unlock the secret of Einstein's brain, returned the brain to Princeton Hospital, giving it to another pathologist who did essentially the same work.
Was Einstein's brain different from other people's brains?
The scientist's brain was of medium size. However, Dr. Sandra Witelson, a postdoctoral researcher at McMaster University in Canada, discovered that the physicist had almost no lateral sulcus, which divides the parietal lobe into two compartments. As a result, the scientist's parietal lobe was 15 percent larger than that of an average man of the same age. The parietal lobe is responsible for human mathematical abilities, spatial thinking and three-dimensional visualization. However, it remains unclear how his brain worked to determine whether it was indeed his brain that made him a genius.
What is the connection between the brain and the genius abilities of a physicist?
Scientists have shown that the size of certain parts of the brain, such as the cortex and parietal lobe, in particular, is a better predictor of intelligence than the size of the entire brain. However, studying the brain comes with many challenges, and scientists are still trying to understand exactly how intelligence and genius can be correlated and studied. Although there are many theories as to what makes a person smart, not to mention numerous standardized IQ tests and psychometric assessments of a person's language memory and other skills, many scientists believe that identifying who is a genius in these ways is unrealistic. Many people believe that the difference between high intelligence and genius is the presence of creativity, which allows a person's brain to produce something previously unimaginable.
We are always interested in the very best. Who is redder and whiter than everyone else, and stronger, smarter. Therefore, we can well explain the interest of scientists in studying the brains of great, talented people. Maybe it will be possible to find signs and causes of genius in the brain of a genius. Many people know that after Lenin’s death in 1924, his brain (despite the protests of his loved ones) was provided for research by scientists led by the German neurophysiologist Oscar Focht.
For full-fledged work on Lenin’s brain, the Brain Institute was created in Moscow, where I was lucky enough to visit several years ago and talk with its director, Academician of the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences Oleg Sergeevich Adrianov.
Of course, they showed me Lenin's brain. A few superficial impressions. What was surprising first of all was that the brain as such does not exist - it is all cut into the thinnest plates and thus stored in numerous boxes. I was also struck by the color - pink. As for the scientific side of the matter, according to Adrianov, Lenin has well-developed frontal parts, which make up twenty-five percent or more of the surface area of the entire brain. With average indicators - 23 percent. The development of the frontal region indicates the ability to generalize and predict future events.
Oleg Sergeevich also spoke about studying the brains of other famous people. For example, Mayakovsky’s speech centers of the brain are very well developed, Academician Pavlov’s - just like Lenin’s, Academician Landau’s brain managed to almost completely recover after a tragic car accident. Our brain has tens of billions of nerve cells, but it is also formed by hundreds of billions of so-called glial cells, the role of which is still little studied, but it is undoubtedly significant. These cells are important not only for maintaining the supporting function of such a semi-liquid system as the brain (like a watermelon, it contains 95 percent moisture), but also, apparently, are the source of some influences on nerve cells, on the nervous system in in general. It is no coincidence, in the opinion of scientists, that the so-called glial index is high among brilliant people - Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov and Albert Einstein, for example.
To my shame, I didn’t know that there was practically a detective story connected with Einstein’s brain. Pathologist Thomas Harvey, after the scientist's death in 1955, removed his brain and disappeared with him. Dissolved. In the mid-seventies, New Jersey Monthly reporter Steven Levy found Harvey and discovered that he still had Einstein's brain. After this, scientists gradually began to work with the brain and discovered a lot of interesting things.
New Scientist: How did you start studying Einstein's brain?
Sandra Wilson: In 1995, Thomas Harvey contacted me and offered to collaborate in studying Einstein's brain. It was cut into 200 pieces and stored in two glass flasks. Harvey also had photographs he took when the brain was removed after Einstein's death.
New Scientist: There has been a lot of talk that Einstein's family is unhappy with Harvey using Einstein's brain without permission...
Sandra Wilson: Yes, the family did not give anyone permission to extract, store, or study the brain. In my opinion, it is indeed somewhat unusual that the brain is not kept in Princeton, where Einstein died. It is also unusual that Harvey himself is not a scientist, but simply a pathologist. Maybe that’s why he started collaborating with me - I have a huge collection of brain samples from a wide variety of people at my disposal.
New Scientist: How did you start your work on Einstein's brain?
Sandra Wilson: First, we weighed, measured volume, and found out the sizes of different regions of the brain. After all, paradoxically, no one has ever made such simple measurements. Even then it became clear that Einstein’s brain was quite ordinary, although the so-called Sylvian fissure was large - the groove separating the temporal and parietal lobes.
New Scientist: Is it unusual or unique?
Sandra Wilson: Unique in the sense that we have never seen anything similar in other people. Einstein's sulcus is so large that it led to changes in the size and location of other areas of the brain. For comparison, this is similar to if a person’s eyebrows were located not above the eyes, but below them.
New Scientist: How might these features of the brain explain his abilities?
Sandra Wilson: A large area of Einstein's brain is the very area that is "responsible" for data visualization, three-dimensional perception, and mathematical intuition. So we can say that Einstein's brain is quite consistent with Einstein's unique abilities.
New Scientist: The groove you mentioned is present in children from birth. Is it possible to examine a child's brain and tell us anything about his mathematical abilities?
Sandra Wilson: If we see similar traits in a child, we can certainly talk about his amazing abilities in the future. The problem, however, is that many people who are talented in mathematics do not have the same traits as Einstein. Perhaps other factors play a decisive role in these cases. It is still unclear to us to what extent the anatomy of the brain can determine a person’s abilities, to what extent it can “compete” with the influence of the development environment of this individual.
New Scientist: Whose brain samples did you compare Einstein's brain to?
Sandra Wilson: We had brain samples from 150 people who died from a variety of diseases, but not related to the brain. Their mathematical and visual abilities were studied. Moreover, they were studied while they were alive. In total, testing of each terminally ill person lasted about thirty hours. We work with the brains of completely healthy people, analyzing how different parts of the brain react to various external stimuli.
I’ll interrupt this interview with New Scientists magazine with Sandra Witelson and try to talk about several more works on studying Einstein’s brain and the problems associated with them.
The first scientific work on Einstein's brain was published in 1985 in the journal Experimental Neurology. Its four authors - Marian Diamond, Amold Scheibel, Greene Murphy and the already famous Thomas Harvey - determined the number of neurons and glial cells in four areas of Einstein's brain.
But there are also problems... For example, scientists used for comparison brain samples from people who were on average 12 years younger than Einstein on the day of his death. In addition, the areas studied were too small to draw such general conclusions.
In the same work, it was concluded that in Einstein’s cerebral cortex the density of neurons is much higher than the average values. That is, a larger number of neurons are “packed” in one volume.
And finally, the last article in The Lancet in June 1999. It compared Einstein's brain with brain samples from people whose average age was fifty-seven years old. Large areas of the scientist's brain were identified that are responsible for mathematics abilities. It also turned out that Einstein's brain is 15 percent wider than average.
I must admit that in biology, in my opinion, the most interesting, most promising and most unexplored area is still the study of the brain. Despite numerous works and experiments, we are still dealing with a “black box”. We influence the brain in a variety of ways and see its reaction. That is, when solving a mathematical problem, such and such a region of the brain is activated, such and such rhythms. But why this happens remains a mystery to us.
Therefore, it is not clear how the brain works and why certain anatomical abilities can lead to genius in one case, but not at all in another. One thing is clear for now - as Stanislav Lec once wrote: “It’s probably very difficult to invent everything from your head,” she asked me sweetly. “It’s difficult,” I answered, “but I think that from my leg it would be even more difficult.”
If you ask the question: “Which genius can you name?”, then Albert Einstein, rest assured, will be in the top ten, or even the top five or even the top three. Although the great scientist owes his place in the public consciousness more to famous photography than to a subtle understanding of the theory of relativity. However, the scientific and, more broadly, cultural significance of his works cannot be overestimated. And here another question arises: what made Einstein Einstein? Many researchers believe that genius lies in the special structure of the brain. That is, the brain of a genius will differ in the location of the grooves and convolutions and other anatomical details from the brain of an ordinary person.
Testing this assumption, generally speaking, is not easy, but Einstein allowed specialists to literally delve into his brain. After the physicist's death in 1955, pathologist Thomas Harvey prepared the contents of the genius's skull for scientific research: the brain was cut into 240 blocks, each of which was packed in a special resin, after which about 2,000 sections were made from such blocks for microscopy. Some of the sections were sent to eighteen scientists, but over the past decades, most of the samples were lost; only those that Harvey kept for himself were fully preserved.
Nevertheless, brain research has borne some fruit. Neuroscientists who have held Einstein's brain in their hands have noted a high density of neurons in certain areas and a high number of glial cells. In 2009, scientists from the University of Florida (USA) published a paper in which they reported that at the macro level, the brain of a genius has some interesting features: for example, the pattern of grooves and protrusions of the parietal lobe of the cortex was quite unusual. However, the work was based on too little photographic material, which the authors received after the death of Thomas Harvey in 2007.
In 2010, the pathologist’s heirs handed over other photographs of Einstein’s brain to researchers. No one except the owner had ever seen these photographs, so there was quite a lot of interest in them. In addition, scientists had a “guide” to the physicist’s brain, compiled by Thomas Harvey: he indicated which block was cut from which part of the brain, as well as which block these or other microsections were made from.
Researchers compared Einstein's brain with eighty-five other people's brains and again concluded that the brain of a genius (at least this genius) was significantly different. In terms of mass, it did not differ much from the statistical average - 1,230 g. However, in the parietal, temporal and frontal lobes there were areas where the nervous tissue was laid in a special way due to its own excess. In Einstein, for example, areas that control facial expressions and tongue movements were enlarged. According to the authors of the work, the scientist’s motor cortex could perform functions that were not particularly characteristic of it, that is, it could also engage in abstract thinking. This is indirectly supported by the confession of the physicist himself, who claimed that mental work for him is similar to physical activity, rather than to the manipulation of words. In addition, Einstein had enlarged areas responsible for the perception of signals from the sensory organs, as well as areas of the prefrontal cortex associated with planning, concentration and perseverance in achieving the intended goal.
And yet, the most interesting thing here is the assumption about the motor cortex, which performed work that was not typical for it. One way or another, the original hypothesis that the brain of a genius should have some differences was completely confirmed. However, a whole series of questions then arise. Firstly, we cannot say with certainty that these differences really have anything to do with genius - here, alas, more sophisticated experiments are required and preferably with some living “Einstein”. Secondly, even if these differences are indeed related to genius, it is not very clear whether every genius has them or whether they are individual differences. To resolve this question, it is necessary to compare the brains of several physicists, preferably great ones. Well, one last thing: I would like to know what came first - the brain or the theory of relativity? That is, Einstein became a brilliant physicist thanks to an inherited brain, or was his brain formed under the influence of the environment, including intensive studies in physics? The questions are, to put it mildly, difficult, and you can be sure that scientists will not leave Einstein’s brain alone for a long time.
I have admired pathologists since childhood. Those who have absolutely no romanticism in their heads!
It was at the dacha, at the dinner table. I'm about four years old. I probably had fun and was babbling about something...
Andrey, don’t talk while you eat,” Aunt Mila says in a gentle metallic voice without raising her eyes (in fact, she was the first pathologist in my life). “Okay, I’m here, if you choke, I’ll pierce your throat with a knife,” her knife made an ominous somersault over the sausage, “and everything will be fine.” What if I’m not nearby?.. - Aunt stopped “opening” the sausage and pierced me with her slanted Buryat eyes.
Needless to say, after this “stabbing” I was afraid for a long time not only to speak, but even to cough in the presence of Aunt Mila. Well, really, what should be going through a person’s head to tell something like this to a four-year-old child who does not know about the indications for an emergency tracheotomy?! There is only one answer: a complete lack of romanticism.
All the more surprising is the case of pathologist Thomas Harvey, the doctor who stole Albert Einstein's brain.
Einstein died in Princeton Hospital from a ruptured aortic aneurysm on the night of April 18, 1955. In accordance with the wishes of the deceased, the funeral was quiet, quick and only for his own people. His body was cremated and his ashes were scattered.
But in those 24 hours that separated the death and the great scientist’s turn to ashes, Thomas Harvey - either with the consent of the executor, or without it (the story is dark) - opened Einstein’s skull, separated his brain and put it in a jar of formaldehyde. By the way, the ophthalmologist of the same hospital, Henry Abrams, taking advantage of the general confusion (just imagine what was happening there that morning!), also managed to extirpate the eyes of the same corpse, later hiding them in his safe deposit box.
Thomas Harvey, however, showed much greater consciousness - he responsibly chopped up the stolen brain and recorded the material. For half a century, Einstein's brain, cut into 240 pieces, traveled across America with the romantic pathologist Thomas Harvey. Harvey hid his “charm” from prying eyes, changed his place of residence, divorced his wife, who could not accept his obsession, and secretly sought allies. Someday, he hoped, we will be able to unravel the mystery of Einstein's genius!
In the early 1980s, Mariana Diamond, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, received a jar of mayonnaise containing fragments of Einstein's brain from Harvey. She would later publish a paper in which she would announce that the samples obtained showed a higher concentration of glial cells than in normal people. Glial cells are something like an insulator that hides the process of a nerve cell and therefore improves its conductivity.
The more actively a particular part of the brain is used, the more glia, theoretically, will grow in the corresponding places.
Part of Einstein's brain was obtained by Dr. Sandra Witelson from the Ontario Research Center in Canada. She concluded that there was a specific fusion of the areas of Einstein’s cerebral cortex responsible for mathematical and spatial thinking. It was in this area, according to Dr. Witelson, that the famous theory of relativity arose (it is based on a geometric - visual-spatial - understanding of gravity). Another feature of Einstein’s brain is interpreted in the same logic - a fifteen percent excess, in comparison with the average, in the size of the parietal lobes of both hemispheres.
In the late 90s, Dr. Harvey, having understood nothing of Einstein’s genius, “tired of the responsibility of storing the brain,” transferred it to the Princeton University Medical Center, where the remaining pieces are still waiting for their romantic pathologist-researchers, whom, as we can see from the example of Aunt Mila, not so much (as you understand, nothing is known about the fate of the brain of Dr. Harvey himself, who died in 2007).
Dr. Harvey's romanticism is destroyed by banal arithmetic: our brain consists of about a billion neurons that are connected to each other by a quadrillion connections (that's a one followed by fifteen zeros), and there are only 23 thousand genes in human DNA, that is, even if our entire genome was engaged exclusively in coding connections in our brains, we are already missing about a trillion genes.
Hence the conclusion: we are not born with brilliant brains (no matter what this phrase means), but we make them so.
Yes, there are individual characteristics: some of us, no matter how hard we try, will never be able to overcome the intellectual level of oligophrenia - this is approximately 1% of the population (unfortunately, unluckily), in addition, connectomics specialists have obtained quite convincing data regarding the characteristics of the brain autistics and schizophrenics - here, too, about 2-3%. Add here another, say, 5% for chromosomal diseases and erased cases of some difficult-to-verify pathology, so that there is a margin, and it’s a stretch for us to reach 10% of the world’s population, whose intellectual fate significantly depends on biological factors. (On the other hand, along the line of life, old men Alzheimer and Parkinson and their fellow degenerates are approaching us, but we will put them in brackets.)
And let's return to arithmetic again, it is indicative. According to calculations by Sebastian Seung, the amount of information contained in one human connectome (these are all the connections between neurons in one brain) is approximately equal to a zettabyte, which is - hold on to your chair - 10 to the 20th power. Obviously, we are faced with a paradox, but of a different kind, because this number is equivalent to all digital information created by humanity to date. Now let's imagine one and a half kilos of gray and white matter lying on the pathologist's table, and ask the question how something like that can fit in it? Of course, we are not talking about actual neural ensembles, but about all, theoretically and speculatively, possible combinations in which the connections of a given system may consist. Of course, only a small fraction of these combinations are carried out in reality, and even less can be attributed to the material substrate of mental activity itself. In general, going this way, hoping to discover a specific thought in the brain, is not just looking for a needle in a haystack, but a grain of sand in the vast expanses of the Universe.
Even if by some miracle we assemble Albert Einstein’s brain, cut into pieces, into a whole, then restore it using a super-powerful computer (by the way, there is no such thing yet), then even in this case we will not know exactly what connections are in this brain were responsible for the theory of relativity, and which ones, for example, for thoughts about how to scratch a heel that was itching while reading the Nobel speech (or, if we are talking about relativity, to scratch someone who was especially itchy with the same heel). In other words, even if the morphological features of the brain are important, their influence on intellectual function is negligible - it is not the morphology of connections that is important, but, as our precious Pyotr Kuzmich Anokhin would say, the “functional systems” they generate, which cannot be found in a dead brain.
Yes, different brains will give us slightly different pictures of the world. Let's say that Einstein's ability for visual-spatial thinking from birth was slightly better than the hospital average. But does the length of the fingers determine the genius of a musician? And it’s not a fact that the geometric model of gravity is ideal, and most importantly, universal (at least, with the help of the same type of thinking, the same Einstein was never able to formulate a unified field theory, and he worked on it for almost forty years). It is quite possible that to solve a number of problems of the same physics, other features of the brain would be very useful. For example, Einstein said that it is impossible to solve a problem if it cannot be represented spatially. This somehow didn’t bother Niels Bohr...
A tendency towards one type of thinking or another is not surprising, but it does not guarantee anything in itself. If you, like Einstein, have a brain that is more likely ready for spatial-mathematical thinking, but you do not develop this feature, then at your post-mortem weighing the brain of an ordinary engineer, to whom your potential (but never achieved) successes were not even dreamed of.
The brain is a developing and training machine. But again, this is not the secret.
Now let's ask the pathologists to wait...
In 1956, American psychologist George Armitage Miller published his later famous article “The Magic Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity to Process Information.” In essence, the entire content of this article is already reflected in its title. However, the “magic number seven” is relevant only for the so-called short-term memory - that which allows us to remember objects for half a minute after they were presented once (in this sense, the previous seven-digit telephone numbers were, for example, ideal - you pronounce it and the person writes it down, does not ask again, but adding the operator code ruined everything).
The function of short-term memory is important, but it will not help us either in solving mathematical problems or in determining the route to follow; with its help, you cannot comprehend career plans and you will not understand the meaning of life. For all these and most other goals pursued by our intellectual function, long-term memory is needed - it is necessary to remember mathematical rules, names of streets, persons and organizations, all sorts of concepts and concepts, etc. But thinking with long-term memory is also impossible: every time you perform some conscious mental act, you are taking something away from your long-term memory, and not using it all at once. At the time of solving the problem, these objects extracted from long-term memory exist in our brain using the mechanisms of working (or, as it is also called, RAM) memory.
In 2001, psychologist Nelson Cowan published his research, which, despite its simplicity, could be called revolutionary. Cowan has convincingly shown (to be fair, similar data have been published before him) that in the case of working memory, Mr. Miller’s “magic number seven” drops sharply to three or four units (and only a few of us can boast that that they think, juggling in their minds simultaneously five intellectual objects). This conclusion cannot but be surprising. Well, we know, for example, about outstanding chess players who demonstrated the wonders of simultaneous play on many boards! Or the famous players “What? Where? When?" - these intellectuals put forward dozens of versions per minute! Finally, what to do with Einstein?! It turns out that if Kovan is right, then his brilliant brain, I beg your pardon, did not have the opportunity to cross this limiting threshold - three, well, five objects that could simultaneously fit into his working memory.
I believe that many people treat with a fair amount of condescension the assertion that modern man has essentially the same brain as a Cro-Magnon man or even a Neanderthal man. They doubt it, quietly giggle, but in vain: biological evolution has its own laws and cannot happen faster than it does, and tens and even hundreds of thousands of years are not a long time for it. Now imagine the simple life of a Cro-Magnon man and try to answer the question: in order to solve some urgent problem, might he need to simultaneously hold more than three or four intellectual objects in his working memory? Hunting? Digging a dugout? Painting cave walls? Making a spear with an animal bone tip? Starting a fire? Pairing? Three or four objects - the edge!
It is no longer necessary and even dangerous: an increase in the number of intellectual objects that need integration would slow down the reaction rate, and the latter is much more important in Cro-Magnon times.
But if our brain is really so primitive that it is capable of counting, I beg your pardon, only up to three (a dash is five), then how, for example, did Einstein have enough of this limited optionality to make such great discoveries as STR and GTR? What's the trick here? The fact is that the intellectual successes of Homo sapiens are not at all connected with wonderful brains that came from nowhere, but with the information encoding mechanisms that are provided to us by culture. With the help of language (and a complex system of other signs), we have learned to encode information, aggregating it into massive blocks. And where a Cro-Magnon man has a piece of coal in his hand, a memory of hunting and a cave wall, a person, for example, has an understanding of the phenomenon of “entropy”, “the second law of thermodynamics” and “the idea of the irreversibility of processes in time” - not a pound of raisins.
It is precisely this ability to “pack” large amounts of information into compressed blocks (intellectual objects) that is the secret of the success of chess grandmasters, “experts” of the crystal owl club and the same Einstein. Yes, the Cowan limitation applies, but the grandmaster operates in his working memory not with individual pieces, but with entire game schemes - it is for this purpose that he has been honing his chess composition skills (problems, studies, etc.) for many years. The “expert” in the same way pulls out from the depths of his long-term memory not individual facts, but strings of ideas associated with the corresponding stimulus material, and it is this skill that takes a long time to learn. Finally, let us remember the famous thought experiments of Albert Einstein, in which you will not find more than three to five objects: elevator cabin - acceleration - ball - observer, train - searchlight beam - speed of light - observer, observer No. 1 - rocket - observer No. 2 and etc.
In other words, the problem is solved not by the number of objects involved in the work of the intellectual function, but by their, so to speak, specific gravity - by how complex they are arranged within themselves.
Let me shorten the story a bit here, since the 10,000 Hour Rule is already well known to the general public, thanks to Malcolm Gladwell's charming bestseller, Geniuses and Outsiders. The rule is simple: 10,000 hours of practice (only without fools, of course) in any field - composition, drawing, artistic writing, medical work, chess, figure skating, programming, etc., etc. - and you will inevitably reach the highest level of skill. The question is, why does the brain need these 10,000 hours? Believe me, in order to simply learn everything you need to understand the relevant field, much less time is enough. Most of this practice is necessary so that a kind of intellectual fragments are formed in a person’s long-term memory - weighty, complex, voluminous intellectual objects (Eric Kandel received his Nobel Prize for describing the mechanics of this process).
Yes, when solving a particular professional problem, these “ten thousand hours” specialists, like any other person, will be able to simultaneously place no more than three to five objects in their working memory, but they will be so powerful that the result will be incomparably higher than any other newbie know-it-all. The power, complexity, and proportion of these intellectual objects coming into the working memory are determined by the number of connections that make up this “functional” system of intellectual function in Anokhin’s style.
Roughly speaking, for each such point - an intellectual object - this specialist could probably write a solid monograph and still would not express everything that he knows, understands, sees.
Now imagine that you, being such a specialist, are trying to comprehend some serious research problem that you have just reached - you have caught it by the tail, so to speak, have a presentiment of the correct answer, but have not yet pulled it out. Your working memory updates and processes, one after another, many intellectual objects related to the topic; you fold them, lay them out, give up something, return to something again. In the end, you settled on three or four such “monographs”, and now, keeping all this disgrace in your working memory, you need, in accordance with the task at hand, to put them - in your mind - into one, new book.
How many nuances, details and features need to be taken into account? A huge variety! After all, these objects are complex, and were not created for this task, and therefore now must be rebuilt for it. This work of the mind requires incredible tension and concentration, time and the will to truth - qualities that are so unusual for our modern culture and so lacking in it. That's why I'm inclined to believe the story that Elsa regularly checked to see if her cousin and part-time husband was walking around with his pants unbuttoned. When there is a small need, you can do it with simple automation, without being distracted from solving an intellectual problem, but in such circumstances it is not difficult to forget to fasten your fly.
Unfortunately, the majority of our fellow citizens rush around the information space with their trousers unbuttoned, but for a completely different reason: not because they are too focused on their intellectual function, but rather because they are no longer capable of it in principle. A full-fledged, high-quality intellectual object cannot be borrowed from TV, or indeed from any external source of information, and the total media dependence of the population, I believe, is no secret to anyone.
From the outside, we are only able to assimilate a falsification of an intellectual object - a rumor, a meme, a media virus, an ideological cliché or stamp.
The actual intellectual object cannot be assimilated or appropriated; it can only be created, independently and inside one’s own head. This is a long process when you combine many times three or four objects (small at first, but then increasingly increasing), adding them to each other, integrating them with the next batch, turning this whole nascent colossus over and over again, and again working through it, adding what -something new (and removing something), raising it to a power and spreading it along new coordinates. After all, we - almost all of us, with the exception of the 10% of the population we received at the beginning of this article - are able to form objects with high specific gravity in our brains, and only these are important for the operation of high-power intellectual function.
But it is, of course, easier to acquire counterfeits.
Fortunately, I have not yet reached my last pathologist, and, apart from classmates who chose this specialization, the “extreme” pathologist for me for now (and part-time forensic expert) is a professor who taught the corresponding course in the Military -Medical Academy. Anatoly Nikiforovich (if I'm not confusing anything) was no longer young, a retired colonel - massive, even overweight, obviously of worker-peasant origin, with a small talk and an amazing military-pathoanatomical "black humor". He joked constantly and, of course, mostly at our expense.
In addition to autopsies and lectures, our so-called practical classes were devoted to solving forensic problems: we were presented with this or that “accident,” and we had to give an opinion on it. The first to raise his hand was always Igor Negoduiko, a lanky, extremely emotional Ukrainian with a nimble and quick mind. Subsequently, Igor became interested in Dianetics, dropped out of the academy and joined the Scientology sect of Ron Hubbard (those were still the days, I must admit). From where, however, he was expelled more than once for excessive zeal, but then they were taken back. Rumor has it that our Negoduiko has now emigrated and become a big shot in the Dianetic pyramid. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s currently sorting things out with Tom Cruise.
Indignant?! - Anatoly Nikiforovich was surprised every time, watching how he, as soon as the question was asked, jumped out of his seat.
What?! - Negoduiko was surprised in response.
“No way,” the professor mimicked him. - Did I tell you that all geniuses are slow-witted?
We talked, and so what?.. I know what!
“You don’t know what,” Anatoly Nikiforovich frowned, “sit down.” Two.
What's two for?!
But think about it!
Pathologists and forensic experts have an amazing medical specialty: they do not treat, but only investigate - scrupulously, carefully, fact by fact. Their work is reminiscent of the work of a detective, reconstructing the picture of an incident down to the smallest detail. They are virtuosos in solving puzzles: how did the “blunt object” move that broke the victim’s skull, what place in the car was the deceased before the car fell into a two-hundred-meter abyss, why did this fighter have a “crossbow” and not a “combat wound” and so on further, further, further. They are devoid of any romanticism, because, unlike any other doctor, they always find out the only correct answer (I don’t know what’s going on with the Last Judgment, but you can’t escape the justice of the pathological court).
However, the true happiness of a pathologist is that he can afford to be slow-witted: he always has time to solve a problem. Yes, Anatoly Nikiforovich, like a real pathologist, did not have any romanticism in his head at all (if he had known about Dr. Harvey’s act, I think he would have been rolling on the floor with laughter). And although the old professor never told us why “all geniuses are slow-witted,” I firmly remembered this main and extremely important lesson of his.
Elsa said that Einstein, lost in his thoughts, wandered around the apartment, completely not noticing her. He could go into the study, then suddenly return, go up to the piano, thoughtfully play a few notes and retire to the study again. His relative David Maryanov recalled that dinner in the house began with Elsa tearing her husband away from work with difficulty and in a demanding tone. Einstein appeared in the dining room, deep in thought, muttering something under his breath in protest. A plate of soup was placed in front of him, which he emptied with rhythmic mechanical movements. He could go out into the rain without a raincoat or hat, then return and stand motionless on the stairs for a long time. The scientist's Berlin friend Janos Plesch recalled one very revealing family scandal: Einstein returned from a week-long trip to a conference, but the things in his suitcase turned out to be clean, folded by a neat female hand. Elsa, understandably, demanded an explanation, not realizing that this caring hand was her own. Einstein never opened the suitcase she had packed: he was busy and thinking.
Could this work be found in Einstein's stolen brain? And was it necessary to steal the brain of this sweet, albeit slightly extravagant old man so quickly, if in order to understand the mechanics of his genius, the same thing is enough - just think about it carefully?
